My first Steam game "United Heist" just reached over 388.000 units. Here are some stats I gathered:

This is an updated blog post from my original reddit post.

The Stats

I created a free 2 player coop Steam game and this is a collection of stats I gathered;

I did no real marketing at all since I have no idea how to do that, but there was one instance of a bigger streamer playing the game. My guess is that I reached a niche of games where the demand is high and the supply is rather low. Or maybe this is totally normal for free games, I do not know.

Here are some stats:

• I started with the development in 29.6.2022 and finished 12.02.2023 at 17:50:26.
• In two days I reached the new and trending tab with >100 players
• The peak was 5 days after release with 335 players at the same time
• At release I had 5 followers on my game and now its close to 1000 while the developer site has 36
• The player per day never dropped to 0 after release, which is pretty interesting that it stays alive that long
• The Steamdb owner estimations are completely wrong and not even close. As I understand they are going by the amount of reviews and maybe a free game is not really comparable.
• Social Media gain; twitter: 29 followers, Instagram: 10 followers, tiktok: 3 followers, youtube: 46 followers

My "marketing":

• I did a twitter post where I paid 20€ and got 361 impressions with 4 likes and 4 comments.
• I created two YouTube videos where I paid 140€ for them to be shown on the right side recommendations for a result of a combined 2200 views, 50 likes, and 15 comments.
• I created two tiktok shitposts which reached a combined 900 views.
• The trailer organically reached 1670 views which comes mainly from gaming review websites embedding it
• I tried the steam curators thing. 11 people wrote something, I sent the keys to way more, but I cannot remember correctly anymore. But IMHO it makes no difference unless you got a big boi hyping you up.

About the Game:

• An asymmetric 2 player coop puzzle game
• Made with Unreal Engine 5
• Made a profit of -500€ (That is a minus)

This whole post sounds a lot like numbers are everything but I just tried to keep it clean, I am very grateful for everything and had a lot of fun and will try some real marketing the next time :D

From the Comments

I think you had a hard time marketing it because it does look like a 'first game'

I struggled alot with the look since i am just a gameplay developer and not an artist. Thats why most of the game is made with basic primitive shapes and a lot of bought assets. Still took a lot of work just to reach the end state, while its not breathtaking i am satisfied with it and for the next game I already started to learn blender to make my own "better/more fitting" assets.

Any plans to try and monetize this success?

Tbh i do not want to touch that game again. I worked myself into burnout with that one. Especially making a coop game alone is alot of overhead, i had to test the same levels hunderts of times while playing both parts at the same time. I just leave it as it is and take on new adventures :)

Why did you make it a free game? Is this your first game?

I just wanted many people to play it and making it free was the easiest way :D Secondly it was just to learn and gather information with publishing.

How do you run the servers?

I do not. The players take care of hosting, which is totally fine in a 2 player game. And steam is taking care of the lobby system for me :)

No - AI in Content

The Text is written by hand :) Also all typos.